Take-Up of Public Insurance and Crowd-out of Private Insurance Under Recent CHIP Expansions to Higher Income Children

NBER Working Paper No. 17658Issued in December 2011NBER Program(s): HE

We analyze the effects of states' expansions of CHIP eligibility to children in higher income families during 2002-2009 on take-up of public coverage, crowd-out of private coverage, and rates of uninsurance. Our results indicate these expansions were associated with limited uptake of public coverage and only a two percentage point reduction in the uninsurance rate among these children. Because not all of the take-up of public insurance among eligible children is accounted for by children who transfer from being uninsured to having public insurance, our results suggest that there may be some crowd-out of private insurance coverage; the upper bound crowd-out rate we calculate is 46 percent.